OVERDRIVER- DOPHIX Purgatorio OD ...my god not another ts lol

$225.00 USD

 DOPHIX PURGATORIO OD 

Is it another Tube Screamer? It might well be but DOPHIX an Italian company have been around forever making a proverbial gourmet pedal or two with great attention to quality, parts, build and design.
Everything about this pedal suggests a Tube Screamer circuit. Sooner or later we pretty much all own a ts either via Ibanez or by one of hundreds and I 'mean' hundreds of OD makers doing a variation of one. I have four! One was even designed beeped up into a high gain pedal so I can be forgiven for not knowing what I have. Two I actually hate and are on Reverb. lol 
The big deal is the basic chip design as there are know numerous wannabes of the famous JRC4558D. Simple... the chip lets some of the clean signal leak through making the sound seem 'transparent'. The problem I find is that
too much dirt from their gain muddys the sound and with too
little the sustain is killed. I am only talking about a whole note of thick sustain too ...just enough that one note flows into the next without that micro second or two of dead silence or the very quick decay of the last note or chord you just played.
Often the pedals sound good on a vid because the tube amp that was used has a great clean sound and/or it is being played at high enough volumes to smooth out the pedals tone.
So far the best in my opinion is the Providence Red Rock OD. Providence addresses the problem by making 3 different ts style boxes. The Red Rock was deigned around the needs of a 50's Strat! It is meant to keep the chime. Damn hard to do!!! It was a good yardstick as it is at least bullet proof on a HB. It scores an 'A' plus on any single coil! Even so it sounds best backed off. Recently I discovered the Duncan Vise Grip compressor that seems to fix the fast decay problem. The Duncan is the exception as I have had and still have 7 other compressors. They are Keeley, Wampler, etc. The bigger the name the bigger the disappointment with most compressors.
The Purgatorio ...is this better?  I can not honestly say ...but it does sound damn good.

Dophix have taken the approach of not trying to reinvent the wheel. They have not paid any over attention to the basic ts pedals weaknesses. They simply tried to capture the original sound without any annoying artifacts caused by cheap parts and sloppy workmanship etc. That was what Keeley was all about when he started out 'Keeley' as a mod company.

In short the only 'fixed' what was broken.